(Loose bundle of thoughts on a theme)
Literature about drug addiction is weird. There’s this real experience in the world people have that’s psychologically gripping, sometimes life-and-death. It’s something that bends the rest of your life around it.
But if you try to write about it, it can come out boring, because the gist is that “there are ways your utility function can be hacked that make you devote resources away from the activities that bring you ‘real’ life satisfaction, and towards a god that takes and never gives”. That’s just not compelling as a story if you’re not predisposed to finding it interesting. “And then this person’s life went to shit – not over gold, or a blood feud they couldn’t let go of, or a religion, or another person – but because they found a magic lever that made them want to press it to their own detriment.”
(Exception: I think Gollum is a compelling character – I wonder if ‘magic made him like that’ is much easier to digest than ‘your neurochemistry is going to go nuts over this pill’.)
Refining what I’m saying above – drug addiction poses a peculiar challenge to write about because it defies narrative logic, or character logic – normally if a character’s driving motivation changes, you need some ‘human-readable’ explanation for it (otherwise it’s bad writing), and ‘uhh, they got hacked’ doesn’t cut it. Character actions usually boil down to a desire for some traditional psychological thing like curiosity, or social recognition, or revenge – but a desire to ingest drugs sort of seems to appear out of nowhere, not tied to the greater world of other people and the mysteries of the universe.
Sex fits that description, but humans tend to grok sexual desire very well, whereas you need to be ‘culturally inducted into understanding drugs’ to grok drugs.
The fact that different drugs are common to varying extents in different countries makes drug addiction a culturally particular thing to write about – when I was growing up in Korea (alcohol and tobacco use very common, everything else that’s a problem in the US was, afaik, not a social problem) I just didn’t understand English language lit where drugs were a thing. Characters would take something, or be revealed to be addicted to something, and their lives would have weird features where it was hard to tell what the connection was between the pills they took and the problems they had. Not only was I ignorant of the immediate effects drugs had on people (I was unaware through my entire teens that drugs could fuck you up physically), but I was unfamiliar with ‘the cultural conversation about drugs’ – the horror someone might experience upon knowing that a loved one was an addict, or the expectation that someone would go to rehab.
Drug addiction is a tempting metaphor for decadence or decay, more than any other single thing I can think of, precisely because it’s a condition that destroys value without giving anything recognizable to an outsider in return, but using it in such a way tends to trade off against realistically portraying addiction.
I was having weirdly similar thoughts to this yesterday
I watched the beginning of the first episode of The Queen’s Gambit, a show in which the main character is addicted to benzos. And as soon as that was revealed I was like … ugh. And that seems kind of weird a priori; I’ve never been addicted to benzos but it seems like a potentially interesting and rich experience I’d like to learn more about. But in practice I feel like all TV storylines about this are going to be the exact same: person gets addicted to benzos, person’s life gets increasingly fucked up, person tries to give them up and either succeeds or doesn’t.
I do think songs tend to do better at portraying drugs somehow. And some other media does okay (I recently watched the Big Mouth episode on adderall and found it pretty good; I think they managed to make the appeal feel visceral enough that you got why the kids were taking it).